Ipswich's workers lag in pay, education

Geoff has been working for the QT since August 2011 covering Ipswich’s rural areas. He started working for APN in January 2010 with the Chinchilla News in western Queensland after growing up on a grain farm. Geoff spends his time out of work watching far too much sport following the Reds, the Broncos and various American teams.

IPSWICH is home to a low income and low education population compared to the booming inner suburbs of Brisbane, according to a new report.

The Grattan Institute's Productive Cities: opportunity in a changing economy report has shown the central suburbs of Australia's biggest cities are home to an increasing number of highly education high-income earners, while the outer suburbs are falling behind.

According to the report, based off an analysis of census data since 1991, residents of outer suburbs are increasingly isolated from high-income jobs.

Report author Jane-Frances Kelly said residents outside the inner-suburbs had limit access to high paying jobs.

"If the trend continues unchecked, then many people risk being locked out of the parts of the city that offer the richest access to jobs," she said.

"Our cities have served our economy well for a long time, but there are growing signs that our housing and transport systems are not keeping pace with the needs of an ever more knowledge-intensive and skilled economy.

"People in these (outer) suburbs have access to so few of the jobs available in our cities that they are extremely vulnerable in a downturn."

According to the report, between 1996 and 2011 the average Ipswich resident saw an annual growth of median income of between 1% and 2% compared with more than 3% in most inner-Brisbane suburbs.

Ipswich is also lagging behind inner-Brisbane in terms of tertiary education, with less than 10% of the population university-educated in parts of the city, compared with more than 50% of the population in much of the northside of Brisbane.